Beards and blokes: our entitlement generation

Once, years ago, I had a boyfriend who creeped me out by wearing my perfume. When he started to show interest in trying some of my clothes, I dumped him.

It was hardly fair. Neither of us had a problem with my wearing his clothes. Then, as now, ''boyfriend jeans'' was a look, and rather a sweet one at that. (This is in itself clearly sexist, since it makes maleness the norm, from which femaleness deviates. So skirts and chemises are girl-stuff but jeans and boots are gender-neutral.)

But while the boyfriend did not last, attempts to redefine gender - in particular the meaning and purpose of maleness - just keep on popping up.

I recall this each time I walk the hood, which crawls these days with that latest male fashion: the baby-face boy-beard. At first glance you'd think that Tasmanian Devil disease has hit town, horribly disfiguring otherwise pretty faces.

Then you see it's voluntary. What to make of this coy, ultra-conscious face-fungus? Does the Beard look to resurrect maleness? Reconfigure it? Or repudiate it? And how, if at all, does it bear on the current spate of young male violence, the terrible ''coward's punch''?

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It's seven years since Maureen Dowd's Are Men Necessary? Yet if the Beard and the Punch demonstrate anything, it is male-pattern insecurity. Is masculinity in crisis? Again?

The New Beard is not just forgetting to shave. It's quite different from the previous young-male face-hair vogue for a day's chin shadow. That lent a soft deshabille with a touch of the Fred Flintstones.

The New Beard is a statement. Chest-length and distinctly animal, yet shaped, waxed and pomaded, it is brandished with the pride of a 19th century patriarch. It's saying something. But what?

The New or Ironic Beard comes with standard accessories. These can be handy in distinguishing it from the Old or True Beard (mostly spotted these days in mosques and Orthodox churches).

Talk about mixed messages. Part Amish, part lumberjack, part Victorian dandy, part spaghetti-western barman, the single common thread is nostalgia; a retro drift to circa 1890, and the wish that the 20th century could be disappeared.

But even the nostalgia is not simple. The New Beard, while explicitly heterosexual, is also painstakingly ironic. So its accessories, far from reinforcing masculinity, deftly defy it.

Life has taught these children that whatever they want, they should have

What, then, to make of this curious signification mash-up? It could be a recognition that, post-Bieber, women want a dash of femininity in their men. Or perhaps it's more of a social ensign, letting you look retro while disavowing bad contemporary attitudes; racism, sexism and generalised hubris (much like fitting a 1950s Volvo with a zero-emissions engine).

Either way, such ambiguity makes masculinity a newly complicated enterprise. Still far less complicated than femininity, naturally, but much more complicated than before. Much more complicated than the masculinity now erupting every weekend in the Cross.

And yes, the coward-punchers are a different demographic from the Bearded Boys. Almost, indeed, demographic opposites: inner-urban hipster versus monkey-brain blow-ins. One is consciously Old Fashioned; the other just out-of-date. But both are causally obscure, and both consume vast amounts of alcohol.

I've always been quite pro-alcohol. It is a social liberator without equal, a cultural enrichment and a godsend for the shy and backward. Indeed, there have been times when I could think of nothing nicer than to be tipsy forever. If only.

So I'm wary of temperance talk. But we are currently engaged in a social experiment that could go horribly wrong. A 20-year process has normalised levels of violence and alcohol consumption - through videogames and porn on one hand, shots and drinking games on the other - that most cultures, with the possible exception of Ancient Rome, would have considered extreme.

Even New Beard culture is bar culture; the cocktail creator as rockstar, the bearded barman against a backlit wall of whiskies.

But the third variable may be the killer; entitlement. These twenty-somethings are the entitlement generation. Reared to expect massive unearned success, they had parents who mainly just bolstered the kid's self-esteem, schools dedicated to ensuring no child ever feels self-critical and sports competitions where every participant gets a gong. No church. Heaven forbid.

Life has taught these children that whatever they want, they should have. Whatever they do, or don't do, they'll be applauded. We have all conspired in this, and the dangerous but fascinating spectacle it makes.

What's to be done? Can regulation help? Shorter drinking hours, greater police powers, fuller jails. But all rely on the fact or threat of punishment. And punishment, as I recall Ethics 101, has three purposes: retribution, reformation or prevention. Retribution is pointless. Reformation is usually unachievable and prevention effective only where the behaviour in question is under rational control.

Certainly, it seems a bad moment for Kings Cross drinking holes to demand extended hours; reckless indeed for government to approve them.

But while alcohol may release the devil, it doesn't create him. We'll eventually have to admit that both the drinking and the violence are, at core, moral issues.

In ancient times, well before Christ, philosophers were obsessed by such questions - what constitutes a good life and how to live it. For us morality is a barely respectable topic of discussion. We take the Good Life to mean a life of the senses, a hammock under some Tuscan fig tree.

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Yet the happiness industry, one of modern life's saddest aspects, shows repeatedly that the ancients were right: in the end, goodness and happiness are one. They taught their children that self-indulgence is just fools' gold. That the monkey brain must be mastered and transcended; that goodness must be fought for, and civilisation perpetually re-won. They knew masculinity, like beards, needs careful shaping.

We, instead, teach our children that the highest good is truth to self, pursuit of dreams, feeling fine, getting what you want. Any wonder that they binge drink and refuse to play nicely with others?

Elizabeth Farrelly is a Sydney-based columnist and author who holds a PhD in architecture and several international writing awards. She is a former editor and Sydney City Councilor. Her books include 'Glenn Murcutt: Three Houses’, 'Blubberland; the dangers of happiness’ and ‘Caro Was Here’, crime fiction for children (2014).